BOWLING GREEN — If all goes well for Bowling Green's hockey team, Slater Family Ice Arena will be noticeably quiet all of next week.
The Falcons have packed for an NHL-style road trip, and now they just need a reason to finish it.
Bowling Green traveled Wednesday to Fairbanks, Alaska, for the first-round of the Western Collegiate Hockey Association playoffs, a best-of-three series beginning Friday against No. 4 seed Alaska. If the Falcons win, they aren’t returning to BG until March 16.
"Everyone is going through it for the first time together," BG captain Alec Rauhauser said. "We'll all pack more shirts, more everything, because we're hopefully going to be gone for two weeks."
The fifth-seeded Falcons didn't know if they would play at home or on the road until the early morning hours of March 1, making the short-notice booking a challenge for a group of 30 traveling commercially. Due to the possibility of a Game 3 on Sunday night, BG can't leave until early Monday morning at the earliest, and the airlines were too booked to bring BG's full travel party home at any point Monday.
The Falcons exhausted all possibilities to get back to Detroit — from busing to Anchorage after the game to connecting anywhere from Seattle to Salt Lake City to Chicago — but will spend all of Monday in Alaska, no matter what.
Given the circumstances, BG tried to keep its travel as light as possible.
"If you fly all the way back to Detroit and you've won the series, you're going to turn around literally in less than 24 hours and drive back back to Detroit to fly some place else," BGSU coach Ty Eigner said. "We just had to figure, what's the best place to fly to?"
The most sensible answer: Minneapolis. The Falcons plan to fly straight there Tuesday, a bus drive away from the top two seeds in the WCHA, Minnesota State and Bemidji State.
Should BG advance, the Falcons almost certainly would play one of those two teams. As opposed to burning another full day of travel, BG would stay in Minnesota all of next week in the event it advances to the WCHA semifinals.
"We were trying to do anything we could to get out of [Alaska] late Sunday after the game and there just were no options," Eigner said. "That being said, if we win, why wouldn't we go to Minneapolis? Because chances are, you're going to either be going to Bemidji or Mankato."
This marks the third trip this year to Alaska, as BG played both Alaska and Alaska-Anchorage on the road during the regular season.
The Falcons made a sizable push for home ice in February by going 6-0-2, but fell a point short of finishing alone in fourth place. Even so, BG enters the first-round series believing it started to turn a corner the past month.
"I think we got back to how we're used to playing, and just being hard to play against," Rauhauser said. "Better defensively, and I felt a lot of guys, their effort started to be a lot better."
Eigner joked BG director of hockey operations Nathan Phillips probably feels like he could be a travel agent after this week, but said everyone on the team is used to the Alaska trips by now.
The most important series of the year starts in a faraway place, but Eigner said the Falcons are nonetheless excited for the chance to keep the season alive.
"It's not like we're on the bus for three straight days. It's two four-hour flights and you get there and you settle in," Eigner said. "We're looking forward to the opportunity."
First Published March 5, 2020, 2:35 p.m.
